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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC)
INTC 50.59+4.9%Feb 6 9:30 AM EST
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To: d[-_-]b who wrote (134401)5/8/2001 3:04:02 PM
From: Saturn V  Read Replies (2) of 186894
 
Ref-
<Soft errors" are any operation read/write that succeeds on a second or later attempt - most often occurs with tape drives, cleaning the heads fixes the problem. >

For silicon chips a Soft Error implies a random but permanent loss of data , mostly a single bit, due to ionizing radiation. This is either caused by extremely low levels of alpha particles emitted by the chip packaging materials, or by cosmic rays. These forms of radiation can dump a million electrons or more into a silicon junction node. However DRAM, SRAM, and some latch nodes can be upset by as little as 100,000 electrons. The problem is serious enough that system designers provide Error Detection and Correction circuitry for DRAMs and L2 cache memory. [ Sun was an exception and they failed to provide the Error Correction Circuitry on the L2 cache memory, causing their servers to crash.]

By contrast a Hard Error is where a particular node will get stuck at a one or zero.
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